The LG Beacon is a good phone for making calls and texting with an inexpensive plan from MetroPCS, but it falls short for multimedia.

The LG Beacon ($39 direct) is a solid, affordable cell phone if you're looking to talk and text on the cheap with an inexpensive plan from MetroPCS. It has a nice slide out QWERTY keyboard, a responsive touch screen, and pretty good call quality. It's also a decent music player, though it stumbles when it comes to all other forms of media. But if you place texting above all else, it's a good choice for the money.

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Design and Call QualityAt 4.1 by 2.1 by 0.7 inches (HWD) and 4.4 ounces, the Beacon is light, but it's also super thick. The back is a metallic red plastic, while the front is matte black. The 2.8-inch capacitive touch screen features 240-by-400-pixel resolution and is surprisingly responsive, but feels a bit cramped; the whole phone feels like it can stand to be a quarter-inch wider.

The handset slides open to reveal a four-row QWERTY keyboard. The red keys are nice and large, though somewhat flat. Still, typing on the Beacon is super smooth, which makes this phone ideal for heavy texters. Text messages are threaded, with a cool bubble look similar to the one used for messaging on the iPhone.

A tri-band 2G 1xRTT (850/1700/1900 MHz) device with no Wi-Fi, reception is average on the Beacon, as is voice quality. Volume gets sufficiently loud in the phone's earpiece, though voices can distort at the top setting. A bit lower, calls sound nice and rich, if just a touch muddy. Calls made with the phone are very clear and feature solid noise cancellation. The speakerphone sounds fine and is loud enough to use outdoors without a problem. Calls also sounded clear through a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars). Voice dialing worked, though I often had to repeat myself to get it right. Battery life is a little short at 4 hours, 58 minutes of talk time.

Unlimited, contract-free plans for the LG Beacon start at $40 (including all taxes and fees) for unlimited talk, text, and Web. $50 per month will get you all of that plus unlimited use of MetroNavigator, which offers turn-by-turn GPS directions. That makes the Beacon a great deal, provided you live in a MetroPCS coverage area and can put up with the slow internet speeds.

User Interface, Multimedia, and ConclusionsThere are three different home screens you can swipe between. To the left is a shortcut for messaging. The main, middle screen can be customized as you please with shortcuts, while the right is for quick access to your 11 favorite contacts. There are five icons at the bottom of the main screen that cannot be moved; they're for apps, contacts, messaging, phone calls, and 'MetroPCS featured apps.' Those features apps include an app store, email, and the Web browser. The whole layout can seem a little confusing at first, but you get used to it.

The Myriad 6.2 Web browser does a fine job with WAP sites, but is painfully slow and difficult to navigate. Also, you'll want to slide the keyboard out to enter URLs, because the onscreen keyboard isn't very usable to enter text. It's nice to be able to access the Web, but don't buy this phone if Web access is a primary concern. Email and IM clients are included for most standard accounts, and both worked fine. All of the requisite starter apps are here too, including an alarm clock, calculator, unit converter, and world clock. There's even an app that lets you use your finger to draw on the phone's touch screen.

The Beacon has 70MB of free internal memory. There's also a side-mounted microSD card slot on the right side of the phone that had no trouble with my 64GB SanDisk card. Music sounded good over both wired earbuds as well Altec Lansing BackBeat Bluetooth headphones ($99.95, 3.5 stars). The phone was able to play AAC, MP3, and WMA files in my tests, so you shouldn't have much trouble loading it up with compatible music. Unfortunately, there's no video playback at all.

The 1.3-megapixel camera is weak. There's no flash or auto-focus, and photos look super blurry, no matter how much light is available. There's also no camcorder, but given the picture quality, you're probably not missing much.

If you're willing to put pictures and video to the side, the LG Beacon is a good choice for inexpensive voice calls and text messages on MetroPCS. We haven't reviewed it yet, but the Huawei Pinnacle ($9) is thinner and lighter, with a BlackBerry-style keyboard, though it too is lacking for multimedia features. The Samsung Freeform III ($19, 3 stars) is similar to the Pinnacle, but is a bit buggy and suffers from short battery life. If you don't need a keyboard, your options are mostly limited to basic but capable flip phones. Or you can spring for the BlackBerry Curve 8530 ($149, 4 stars), which gets you better multimedia capabilities and a vastly improved Web browser, but requires a $60 monthly plan.

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About the Author

Alex Colon is the managing editor of PCMag's consumer electronics team. He previously covered mobile technology for PCMag and Gigaom.
Though he does the majority of his reading and writing on various digital displays, Alex still loves to sit down with a good, old-fashioned, paper and ink book in his free time. (Not that there's anything wrong wit... See Full Bio

LG Beacon (MetroPCS)

LG Beacon (MetroPCS)

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